Butters Dies
by TheGirlInTheRedPoofballHat
Summary: Kenny McCormick has always had it pretty hard, yet having Butters steal his limelight is fast becoming the biggest injustice of all.


Kenny McCormick had a pretty tough life. For a start, his parents were alcoholics, he was constantly ridiculed for being poor, he couldn't seem to help dying in extremely gruesome and unfortunate ways (or so his friends told him) but was never able to clearly remember these events themselves... and he had been _trying_ to get laid for almost 14 years despite being only nine years old.

The worse thing was that his best friends, Stanley Marsh, Kyle Broflovski and Eric Cartman, had recently started abandoning him in favour of Butters, a kid who they didn't even like and who was basically the same as him in purpose, except less interesting and less original.

While the spotlight was occasionally on him, Kenny couldn't help but notice how often Butters became included in the other boys activities as time went on. For example, that time when they had tried to get rich by photographing Britney crapping on a squirrel... Kenny couldn't help remember that it was Butters, not him who they had asked to dress up as the squirrel: even though previously he had been almost renowned for involving himself sick, degrading acts for money. What had happened with that? Hell, they didn't even invite him.

And from what Kenny remembered of that time he was dying in hospital, hadn't Eric stood at his bedside and told him that he considered _them_ to be best friends? Nowadays, he only ever seemed to hang around with Butters. Like when Cartman had tried to infiltrate a Chinese restaurant to prevent them from taking over the United States... and had chosen Butters, not Kenny, to be his accomplice. Kenny just couldn't understand it; he was surely by far the most badass of Eric's friends.

He also thought back to when he had started getting high off of cat urine after hearing about it at school... regardless of how messed up his life was at that point, it was made hundred times worse by the knowledge that while he was lying around destroying himself, all the (metaphorical) cameras were on Butters as he became slowly more immersed into Kenny's group, taking over his role and shunning him out while pretending to seem like a friend to him.

Recently, when Kyle, Butters and himself had been diagnosed as sex addicts, Kenny had been hoping to spend some time forming a relationship (of sorts) with Butters so that he could try to deal with the frustration he felt... but of course he had stupidly caused his own death and had missed out on another opportunity to deal with their problems; while in the meantime Butters had received more attention than ever.

Kenny wondered why, when he and his friends had gone to Imaginationland, they had barely spoken to him (and more to the point why Butters had been the one who was unluckily left behind... wouldn't fate suggest that was his role?)

If fact, his friends hardly ever talked to him these days. It was ridiculous if you thought about it: he couldn't get a word in edgeways, and yet people had a go at him for being quiet? Where was the logic in that?

A while ago, it might have been quite easy for Kenny to take a liking to Butters, given how inoffensive he was, but the kid had become such a prick of late that Kenny found it impossible to feel sorry for him. Hell, Butters thought getting beaten up by his parents, _once_, was bad? Trying living with constantly violent parents who didn't even care about you, and on top of that, dying almost every day for 5 years... then and again, Kenny thought, at least that made people pay some attention to him...

Kenny had often contemplated suicide, but he realised it wouldn't work, and would probably just seem like either stupidity on his part or a weak attempt at gaining attention. So he realised that he had no choice: he had to kill Butters.

The first thing to decide on was a method. From Kenny's experiences of death, he knew that sticking him in a microwave, rigging a piano to fall on him and giving him syphilis would all work out as pretty painful ways to go, however his family didn't have a microwave because they only ever ate frozen waffles and pop tarts, and infecting Butters with syphilis might be somehow wildly interpreted as sexual by fangirls. Also, he had already tried scrambling Butters' brains with a ninja star and... _oh my God_... the bastard has survived, so he had to ensure the method was faultless. He decided on the piano idea.

After miraculously finding a piano in a junk yard, Kenny developed enough strength to drag it back to his house on a sledge and carried it up to his (non-existent) attic, where he attached some rope to its leg and, still possessing superhuman strength, hoisted the piano out of the window while retaining a tight grip of the rope. Then he called Butters and asked him to come over, to which Butters gleefully agreed in forced, overly-wholesome tones. Then Kenny made his way downstairs, extending the rope behind him as he did, and waited by the battered front door.

He was assuming a lot; for example that Butters was stupid enough not to notice a huge, dark wood piano hanging out of the upstairs window. However, he was also fairly sure his assumptions were correct.

As soon as Butters knocked on the door, Kenny swung it open, grinning with a little too much enthusiasm.

"*Oh, hey dude,*" he greeted, trying to keep his voice steady.

"HEY KENNY," Butters replied in his usual forced, stuttering Southern accent, "I wanted to see you before now but I was worried my parents would ground me for something inane I might, _possibly_, do, so I decided to sit at home and play Hello Kitty: Adventure Island instead."

"*Oh really Butters, that's awesome.*" Kenny replied, making no effort to feign sympathy.

"So Kenny, um, do you want me to come inside so we can hang out?"

"*No, no, it's cool Butters, we can just chill out and hang here.*"

"Oh, um, in the doorway?"

"*Yeah my mom and dad are fighting a lot and we have a rat problem, you know.*"

"Oh, okay, yeah I'm probably best if I stay here for now. So have you had lunch yet?"

"*I don't eat lunch Butters, my family are on welfare.*"

"Oh, yeah, that's right."

Small-talking with Butters was really not very exciting, Kenny realised, and there was only so long for which he could provide entertainment. Kenny let the rope drop from his hand.

"Oh, hamburgers!" Butters cried, looking up, "I think you left a piano up there Ken-"

There was a loud "splat" as Butters became no more... and an abundance of red, unpleasantly scented liquid that Kenny recognised only too well seeped out from beneath the piano.

"*WOO-HOO!*" Kenny shouted, dancing around, past the piano that concealed Butters' mangled body, and into the main road. It was here that he was subsequently run over by a car.

At this precise moment, Stan, Kyle and Cartman happened to be walking past.

"Oh my God, you killed Kenny!..." Stan shouted. He looked expectantly at Kyle, who acknowledged that the creators were bastards a few seconds later.

Well, at least Kenny's friends finally cared about him. They subsequently found Butters' body, and were unfazed, because they realised that Butters' had only ever been an ancillary member of the group and no longer offered any likability or importance.

All except for Eric Cartman, who was traumatised at the loss of his easily-led whipping boy and/or accomplice.

"Well, Cartman," Kyle began, "surely this is a good thing, because now you can engage with us more?"

"I hate you you guys, so very, very much", Cartman retorted, closing his eyes in exasperation as he did so, "_screw_ you guys: I'm going home."

The remaining two boys watched him leave.

"Well, we don't hear that often anymore," Kyle started, breaking the silence.

"I know, dude," Stanley lamented.

"Yeah," Kyle mused, "but you know I've learned something today. Sometimes we take our friends for granted, and assume that life is just one huge-scale cartoon, or reality TV show, and that everything will work out okay because it always does... but Butters dying kind of made me realise that it isn't always the case. And maybe, just because we expect Kenny will come back, that shouldn't stop us from caring about him... because it doesn't make him any less of a human being, or of any less importance to us. And that maybe if we try including him in our group more when he does, we'll realise that he can offer just as much, if not more to us than Butters can. And that just because something is old or overdone doesn't stop it from being important... and it certainly doesn't mean it has to be replaced or got rid of... because familiarity is what makes us enjoy life, you know?"

"Yeah dude, _totally_..."


End file.
